Ahh, yes... German cars. If every decent car company does something with 6 parts, the Germans will find a way to make it require 27 parts. All of which are horribly expensive and require specialized tools to install. Or they'll put the timing system at the back of the engine so that a routine service item becomes an engine-out procedure. Garbage cars driven by people who don't know any better.

The space station leak reminds me of an old trick for a leaky cooling system in a car: put pepper into the radiator.

The little flecks of ground pepper get washed around the cooling system and eventually block tiny cracks in the radiator or other places. Putting a raw egg into a *cold* radiator will do the same thing; when the engine gets warm it cooks and blocks the leak. Both of these tricks have saved me on the road, they do work. But they are temporary and you need to thoroughly flush the cooling system after the repair.

I wonder if the Space Station has had the same sort of thing happen - airborne dust blocking a leak?

I understand why it happens. What I was (profanely and tersely, I admit) questioning is management's competence. The product is awful in multiple ways ranging from hilariously wrong to dangerous. They know this.

They also know quite a bit about providing useful, accurate information - whatever else you can say about Google, they are really good extracting signal from unstructured data. Note quite as good as they are at extracting money from advertisers, but really good.

And yet they're choosing to push this wannabe general oracle thing that is utterly unfit for purpose. They should be embarrassed, both for releasing it and for chasing the hype like a chump instead of acting like the leader in the field they actually are. I know a lot of that is public market pressure, but it is still dumb and a bit weird, and makes them look stupid. Let Microsoft release broken crap nobody uses by choice, that's what they do. At least be marginally competent and don't release stuff that doesn't work.

"After setting fire to immense amounts of money on fire, I cannot point to a single compelling use case for an end of year summary. Perhaps worse, I can't even think of anything better to say about it other than use a quote from a dead guy to show I didn't quite get what he was talking about, either."

"Sure, the answer might be wildly incorrect, but it might get it right if you shake the Magic 8 Ball again."

What the fuck is this? Sunrise is a solved problem. We know how to calculate sunrise.

That one of the richest companies on the planet, the one that claims to be "organizing the world's information", publishes some idiotic tool to do that routine thing wildly incorrectly is just fucking stupid.

That them doing so apparently motivates you to defend them is... really weird.

I've been reshuffling my retirement savings to mimimize exposure to tech stocks. All mining and Agriculture, because by my reckoning, no matter what happens people will still need to dig holes and eat food. Fairly safe imho.

caveat: Not american agriculture however. Those Tarifs are doing *stupid shit* to the sector.

But will they release a new iPhone SE? I still want a phone that fits into my pocket.

Experience only matters if you make a new version. Otherwise the experience has no value. The patents are only useful if enforcable, and if they provide defensive value against companies they don't already have defense against, orif the category becomes big enough to leverage against others who do succeed. Seeing as they shut down production, it's unlikely they will create a new version anytime soon. There's not enough demand. They have an extensive patent portfolio, so the defensive value is questionable. The offensive value is also negligible, as they're unlikely to get much out of it given the lack of success in the category. So no, not a good return.

Its useless. It doesn't do anything anyone needs or wants. Which is why VR headsets have failed in the market repeatedly, and at much cheaper pricepoints. That's why it's not a fantastic value- it's no better than existing tech, it doesn't solve a problem, nobody wants the category, and it's priced at nearly 10x the competition. On every front it's the exact opposite of value.

WHat were there expectations? If they were much higher, then it's a disappointment. If it was inline, then it isn't. How much did they spend in R&D on the device? Again, if it was a net loss, it's a disappointment. If it was a profit, it might not be. (A loss might also be ok if it launches a category that becomes successful, but this doesn't seem to be the case here).

Given that they shut down manufacturing, it seems very likely they sold way under expectation and overbuilt capacity. It also seems likely in that case they lost money. Which would make this a disappointment.

I do disagree- it's frequently prohibited by the contracts you sign to get the options. It has been for every startup I've ever worked for.

The decision to do it was made in 2011, and they've been building the parts that will go into it, and they'd already committed to doing the installation at the end of the current operating period, but the schedule for ending that period is "mid-2026", so he gets to be the one who makes that date exact, with people hoping to get one last experiment that doesn't need the upgrade in before they have to wait a long time.

Theres actually a better reason to drink in moderation.

Because its fun.

And life is too fucking short and you only get it once, and living it in misery is not fucking worth it. If my life is 5 years shorter and 5 times as fun, well, seems like a good trade off to me.

They probably can't. There's limitations on the ability to sell pre-IPO options. Both legal limitations with SEC regs, and limitations by the terms of the agreement that gives them the options. Not being allowed to sell them at all pre-IPO unless given explicit permission by the company is pretty much universal. The company doesn't want to risk a hostile takeover via random entities buying stock options.

They can't sell those stock options on the open market. It's unlikely they are allowed to sell them at all right now. Even if they go IPO, they will likely be locked in for a significant period. And given the rate the company is burning money, it's highly unlikely to fetch anything near it's last valuation when it does go public. It's likely to fetch a fraction of that (and just going bankrupt is a distinct possibility). So yeah, when you're paying monopoly money you can give really high numbers. In the end, they will likely have made more working at any non-startup big tech company.

"The one size fits all model of education is broken. "

It was broken the moment this method was being pushed. What worked was "One size fits MOST". You direct your resources on educating those who can benefit from the "Most" of the "one size". The ones that this doesn't work with is now a much smaller subset and can be managed with smaller class sizes (in the case of hands on need), special campuses (for behavior issues that would otherwise affect the "fits all" of the hated "one size fits all") and a much smaller pool of administrators necessary to make it all work.

Oh... less administrators. Never mind. Unions will hate it. Just shut up and give them more money.